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I rehab old pcs and pass them on to seniors who can't afford one, so it's very hard to keep up with my 'system specs'. Right now I have 8 pcs (Win 95/WIN 98SE/ Ubuntu/XP/Win 7)on hand but am talking specifically about a new (Personal) Dell Inspiron 3000 win 8.1 OEM and an old rehabbed Lenovo Thinkcenter from about 2004 that was originally had an XP PRo OS. I bought a win 7 HP upgrade for the Lenovo, installed it to upgrade the XP PRo and have used it for a year or so. Thinking of stripping the Lenovo and moving the HD to replace the win 8 in the dell and holding on to that win 8 drive until Win 10 arrives at which time I'll ugrade to Win 10.

I have used the Lenovo win 7 HD as a test for win 8 beta.

I don't understand MS licensing but everything passes their activation process. My 'clients' usually don't care what the OS is as they don't go online but use them for typing letters and playing old games.

Question: would microsoft allow me to take the purchased win7 upgrade on the old HD and use it in the new PC as a win 7 installation?

But newer PC's have UEFI BIOS' and Win8 specifically has Secure Boot. So if the hard drive doesn't have a UEFI install as evidenced by the presence of an EFI System partition in Disk Mgmt, then you'd need to enable CSM, Compatibility mode or Legacy BIOS and disable Secure Boot to have a chance for it to work.

Then if you can get it to boot, you'd need to reactivate with a Win7 retail Product Key at Control Panel>System. If it rejects the Upgrade key you'd need to do the quick Option 3 registry workaround at Clean Install with a Upgrade Windows 7 Version.

This does not relieve one of the necessity of having a qualifying retail or factory OEM XP or Vista on hand though not being used to use Upgrade version, although this is on the honor system.

I would fix Windows 8. It is a fast system - generally faster than Windows 7. You must have a specific problem. I would suggest a refresh. If you have already upgraded to Windows 8.1, you will have to do that again. If the PC came with Windows 8.1, you only have to reinstall some programs.

Can I replace win8 HD with Win7 Hd?

How can i share between Win7 and Win8.1 ?So i have a laptop with Win7 and a new pc with Win8.1 both hooked to a router and im trying to share a drive between them and i keep getting the dreaded "Enter network credentials" prompt so...
Can someone share a simple list of things to do to share things...i dont care about security cause all...

Network & Sharing

win7 to win8 homegroup?i have recoverd a hard drive from a laptop(o/s win 7 hp) and copied the lib files to my pc, my daughter has now gone and brought a new laptop using win 8. the back up files are over 40gb(mainly photo`s and pdf docs) what is the best way to transfer the files to the new laptop? i was going to add it...

Network & Sharing

Win8 to Win7 back to Win8 (HELP! w BIOS, product key on BIOS etc.)Hello everybody!
I received a laptop awhile back that came pre-installed with Windows 8 which I did not enjoy, so I decided to downgrade to Windows 7. Which has been going fine and everything is good, but 2~3 weeks ago I had some questions involving my computers performance that I also requested...

Installation & Setup

Confusion over going from Win7 to Win8/8.1I use Win 7 on a desktop PC, and recently purchased 8.1 as the way to move up to Win 8.1. I have not yet attempted to install it. In a non-Windows forum, I asked about this, and found that to get to 8.1 I would either need to replace 7 entirely with a 8.1 install, or save programs, Word, Office,...

Installation & Setup

Install win8.1 from win7Hi,
I'd like to install win 8.1 on a different hard drive along with my current win 7. Can I simply mount the win8.1 iso (daemon-tools) and install it from win7, or do I have to burn a dvd first?

Installation & Setup

Direct X 11.1 not available for Win7, only Win8This is being touted as one reason why we "have no choice" but to move quickly to Win8. It's astounding that MS doesn't care what the market verdict is on Win8 but intends to ram it through at the expense of their most popular OS and the only one which is selling strongly.
Microsoft won't...